GBBO week 1 – apple and rum drizzle cake

It is August 2016 and the Great British Bake Off is back for another year. And not only that, the Great Bloggers Bake Off is also back, so I’ll be participating in Jenny’s challenge each week and making one of the Bake Off bakes.

If you want to join in (you don’t have to be a blogger to do so) then read the full details here. You can read a recap of my previous year’s bakes as follows:

The first episode was a corker as always (and happily helped to take my mind of the sadness of taking my beloved cat Henry to be put to sleep): cake week. The challenges were a signature drizzle cake, a technical jaffa cake, and a showstopper mirror glaze cake. As always, I need other people to help me eat the cake, so I needed something Andrew would actually eat: that usually means something with apple in it, and something with alcohol in it: the answer was an apple and rum drizzle cake!

I made this spiced apple and rum cake as the base (by the way, a fantastic recipe which just gets better over the week if for some reason you aren’t able to gorge on it all in one go) but upped the quantity of rum in both the cake and the drizzle. To make it a bit different from the previous cake, I made a thin icing using rum and icing sugar to drizzle over the top. That meant the original drizzle (rum, honey and sugar) moistened the cake, while the icing drizzle decorated it.

I recommend you make this cake as it’s so simple (especially if you have a freestanding mixer which does all of the hard work for you), and with the mixed spice in the mixture I think it smells so festive … perfect either for autumn (hey, we are in August!) or over the Christmas period if you are not a fan of a traditional Christmas fruit cake.

If you wanted to jazz up the cake for a dinner party, I’d whisk some calvados into double cream to make an additional boozy accompaniment to the cake, which is so sticky and soft that it’s almost like a pudding in itself anyway. Or you could make a calvados custard to serve with the warmed cake.

Next week is biscuit week on the Bake Off, and I am thinking of making a viennese whirl, which I believe is the technical challenge. These are surprisingly simple to make (except the piping) and melt in the mouth. I am thinking that perhaps nutella and hazelnut could be a feature of my whirls! I’ll give it a whirl anyway … hahaha.

Are you participating in the Great British Bake Off challenge, and if so what bakes are you planning? Here are some drizzle cakes from fellow bloggers:

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10 Replies to “GBBO week 1 – apple and rum drizzle cake”

firstly, i am so sorry about your cat (hug) xx
Secondly, what a great idea for a cake, i can imagine how festive it was due to the spices you used, oh and the rum!
thank you for linking up with my linky again xx #GBBOBloggers2016

Well one word, and one word only, made me hop on over here from Jenny’s #GBBO challenge and that word was…rum!
I love rum and oh my, the thought of rum drizzle has me salivating. I’ve never thought of doing that before – very clever! Apples are just coming into season here and I have bookmarked your recipe to make sometime soon. Thanks for sharing!

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